Maybe they were all behind metaphorical bars, Julia thought, quite suddenly: they’d been hiding in here for forty-eight hours, barely daring to visit the boulangerie. Policemen had come and gone, interviews had been taken and recorded, but Julia and Alex had been stuck here, in a darkened apartment, together and isolated.
Alex came into the room from the kitchen, clutching his third mug of tea; he sat on the sofa, saying nothing. Rouvier gestured at the sheet of paper with the essay title carefully written thereon. The essay that had, for some unknown reason, disappeared.
“Miss Kerrigan. Can you explain it to me, briefly? Recall that I am a humble detective from the farthest provinces. A péquenaud.” He smiled, charmingly. “I may not understand complicated science. How does your new theory connect with this missing article by Quoinelles?” The smile faded. “And all the murders?”
Julia offered a pinched smile of her own. “As I said, I don’t have a theory. Just ideas. First you have to know a little bit about the evolution of the human mind.”
“Of course.”
“Behavioral modernity is a term used by some scientists to express the idea that humans made”—Julia glanced at Alex, then back at Rouvier—“a kind of Great Leap Forward in their cognition and cultural development around forty thousand years ago.”
Rouvier asked, “Evidenced how?”
“Well, firstly, the birth of art — the cave paintings. But there are other signs at this time of humans suddenly changing their behavior, signs of advanced and abstract cognition. Hunting becomes much more elaborate and efficient — animals are corralled and herded over cliffs, showing significant forethought. Music and game-playing emerge, refined bone tools are manufactured, barter is seen between tribes; and religious rituals become complex, including proper burials. All these behaviorisms sharply differentiate Homo sapiens from previous hominid forms, such as Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalis. Basically, the idea is that we quite suddenly became fully human around forty thousand years ago.”
“Why did this change happen?”
“Two main perspectives. One is a sudden genetic mutation in human DNA, another is an actual change to neural structures of the brain, evolution of the brain itself. Maybe in the frontal cortex! No one is sure.”
The sounds of the Paris traffic filtered into the quiet apartment.
“And you believe Professeur Ghislaine was investigating this?”
“Perhaps yes. Surely, yes. Just look at his essay title. ‘Guilt and Conscience in the Paleolithic Caves of France and Spain.’ We also know he was interested in the trepanned skulls: his very first work, as a student, was done in Lozère, where he probably encountered the theories of Prunières and — and we know Annika was an expert on the cave art of Lascaux and Gargas—”
Rouvier raised a hand. “You are referring to the skulls you found in your caverns, and the same skulls, and damaged bones, found by Pierre-Barthélemy Prunières a hundred years ago, in the same region?
“Sure, but—”
“And because this Prunières mentions Cochin China, you believe that, somehow, this ties it all in to the murders… by a Cambodian, a possibly Asian killer. Yes?”
“Yes.” Julia felt herself blushing. She was slightly angry at herself: she should be advocating her ideas better than this.
Rouvier sighed. “But. I am still a little unclear. How are they tied together?”
“I don’t know — but I know they are! They must be! I just haven’t worked it out yet.” She stopped, with a stammer. Why was she almost shouting? Why was she so histrionic?
The apartment was quiet. Alex was looking at the slatted windows, a faint trace of embarrassment on his English face.
Julia felt, absurdly, like she had failed Rouvier, the way she had once disappointed her father; but she also felt an injustice. She couldn’t piece together the lost essay just like that, she needed time, and clues, and maybe luck. And given enough time, she might prove she was right. Because she was right. She was energized by this idea: I am right.
Not only was she right, she was surely just repeating someone else’s excellent analysis. Ghislaine’s. Indeed, she even felt a slight resentment that Ghislaine had got there so long before her: she had thought herself so insightful, that day on the Cham, sensing the guilt in the past, the stones, the bones, yet Ghislaine, it seemed, had been there already—the origins of guilt and conscience? — and he had maybe achieved a much smarter, deeper, older explanation. Something that circuitously led to his death?
Maybe. But how could she explain this series of hunches and guesses to a sober and practical policeman? She couldn’t.
Rouvier was standing. He walked to the long windows of the eighteenth-century apartment and pulled down a few slats of the modern gray blinds, looking out at the softly rumbling traffic. He spoke to the window: “I do not know. I am not a Tarot reader of ancient times. It is a fascinating idea but I am not sure how it helps us.”
Julia subdued the last of her enthusiasm. She felt mortified, almost scorned; Rouvier was just being his normal self: polite, charming, sensitive. Yet it was as if her parents were in the room, pouring kind but skeptical cold water over her teenage dreams of a serious archaeological career. Inside her was the old rage at being patronized.
“However,” Rouvier added, “there is one aspect… Hmmm… I wonder…”
“Wonder what?”
“The fact that this essay disappeared. This is interesting, and maybe relevant.” He turned and faced her directly. “You say that the article is mentioned in, if I have the word, bibliographies — it is referenced and indexed? Correct?”
Quickly, she answered, “Yep. The essay was only ever published in one magazine, an extremely obscure academic journal. There might only have been a couple hundred copies ever printed. But all these copies have gone! Not in the libraries. Taken and not returned, maybe destroyed. Weird… is that weird?” She was unsure of herself now.
Rouvier was sitting down again. “No. It is unusual. And, as I say, it possibly relates to something else we have discovered.”
Alex spoke, for the first time: “What?”
Rouvier smiled. “Exactly how old was Ghislaine Quoinelles when he wrote this?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Oui. And already he was being published in academic journals, no matter how obscure. We know he was building quite a reputation, a famous radical. And yet, soon after this, his career dwindled. He went to Cambodia, he returned to France, and he promptly disappeared into obscurity, back to where he came from, where he did his student work, the caves of Lozère — and there he stayed. Despite the dazzling promise of his early career, it all dwindled away.”
“Yep,” Alex interrupted. “And he never told me — or Julia — about any of this. The essay, I mean. And Annika never mentioned it. It’s like he suppressed it, denied its existence. Denied his past. Rather odd.”
Rouvier hunched forward, his flecks of gray hair almost silver in the fading light. “But maybe not that odd? Or at least not unique.” He reached into his briefcase and lifted out a piece of paper with a photo. Julia recognized it immediately. The same poignant photo of the mission to China and Kampuchea in 1976. That gallery of smiling young faces, in the hot Phnom Penh sun, with the queerly empty boulevards in the background.
The detective waved an eloquent hand across the photo.
“We have now completed our investigations into these people. They were scattered across the world. Yet they share two things, apart from their membership of this mission.”